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Virtual Velocity: Effective Project Management Gives Virtual Teams the Edge

Written by Cynthia Low on . Posted in Articles.

The need for speed has never been greater, but anyone who has worked from a home office or on the road knows how easily virtual velocity can be hampered without the right tools and ground rules.

The right tools are easy enough to find. Most of us already have them or have access to them: email, Instant Messaging, conferencing (both video and tele), cellphones and Blackberries. Once the tools that are right for your organization are in place, the biggest barriers are often around communications and work culture. Ground rules that focus on them can increase your team’s productivity and let you reap the rewards of the virtual workforce.

Build Trust in Person and Grow that Trust with Clear Expectations
In order for people to work effectively virtually, there has to be trust. Trust doesn’t happen magically. It is built when you bring your team together for training or team building, and then continues to grow with clear expectations consistently set by leaders and met by the team.

Manage Results, Not Activity.
In the physical office environment, “busy work” often gets mistaken for real work. In the virtual environment, when you can’t see what people are doing, the key is to manage results. Set expectations and monitor the results, not the daily activities.

Schedule Regular Communication
It’s important that there is a regular time for reporting both progress and potential pitfalls to the team. This keeps people on track and gives every one the discipline of a team check-in.

Create Communication that Saves Time — Not that Kills It
Have you created an email culture that wastes time with endless “daisychain” conversations that take several hours to read? Does your team spend hours trying to solve an issue with an email conversation that could have been solved with a thirty-minute conference call? With email, being a critical tool in our work environments, it’s important to create a new culture of effectiveness around it. Ask yourself: how you can make your team’s email communication even more productive?

Create Standards that Build a Cohesive Culture
What are your standards of quality? How do you define excellence? What does your brand mean to each employee? Making sure everyone knows the answers to those three questions is even more important when people are scattered geographically. Virtually, you need to create cohesion with excellence and a sense of pride in what your company stands for.

Define Rules of Responsiveness.
When people are working remotely, it’s important that you define what your rules of responsiveness are for your culture. How quickly are people expected to return an email, an Instant Message or a phone call? What is your protocol when people are out of the office or on vacation? If you’re in a customer service environment, it’s important to have clear expectations regarding how to respond to all customer inquiries.

Working virtually is not rocket-science, but it does require new rules for our workforce. These tips are a good starting point for your team as you build your own best practices for effective project management in the virtual world. Enjoy the journey and invite your team to help you create a powerful work culture.

Michelle LaBrosse is the founder and Chief Cheetah of Cheetah Learning. An international expert on accelerated learning and Project Management, she has grown Cheetah Learning into the market leader for Project Management training and professional development. In 2006, The Project Management Institute, www.pmi.org, selected Michelle as one of the 25 Most Influential Women in Project Management in the World, and only one of two women selected from the training and education industry. Michelle is a graduate of the Harvard Business School’s Owner & President Management program for entrepreneurs, and is the author of Cheetah Project Management and Cheetah Negotiations. Cheetah Learning is a virtual company and has 100 employees, contractors, and licensees worldwide.

A version of this article appeared in the February 4, 2008 issue of CareerSmart Advisor

What is the Most Serious Issue with Project Management Today?

Written by Ilya Bogorad on . Posted in Articles. 5 Comments on What is the Most Serious Issue with Project Management Today?

No profession is immune to problems and shortcomings, and project management is no exception. In my opinion, the most critical issue with the profession today is as follows: it is just not strategic enough. What on earth does this mean, you ask? Let me explain.
The famous quote from Peter Drucker goes like this:

Project Management for the Masses

Written by Mike Morton on . Posted in Articles. 7 Comments on Project Management for the Masses

This is a rant of mine from a year ago, but I think it’s well worth repeating.

Many industries, organizations, departments, divisions and people find our professional world of project management intimidating, confusing and all too much to be able to apply to their projects.

Their projects are not big enough to apply most of our processes. But more importantly, the people managing these projects are not full time project managers and they will never be full time project managers. Typically, these people are part time project managers with MANY small projects on the go at once. They are office administrators, operations people, managers and directors of departments. To all of them, there is no time or energy for PMBOK, PMI, Gantt charts, pert charts, risk assessment plans nor a quality plan.

But what is there time for? What can our big bad world of project management offer these people and their projects to help them deliver on time, on budget and within scope?

If I had to pick the key ingredients to small project success I would group them into three areas:

  • A solid foundation
  • A stake in the ground
  • A plan and a process

A Solid Foundation
Every project, regardless of its size must be built on a solid foundation. A well-defined objective answering the question: what are we building? You should create some sort of scope definition document or project charter. Force every initiative into a brief, simple series of questions: who, what, why, when, where.

But there’s more. You also need a key stakeholder – someone who is ultimately responsible, who you can count on for support, funding and receipt of the final product.

The right team – making sure you have the right people in place before you start. This could include suppliers, vendors and, of course, anyone internal or external who you need to complete the project.

Enough time – you need to take time out to outline the schedule of work – no detailed scheduling tool required, no task dependencies – just a simple, to-the-point schedule.

Enough money – do a budget! No matter how small the project. Be sure your stakeholder understands ALL the costs.

A Stake in the Ground
By this I mean a solid start date, end date and all major milestones defined. And a name! Give your projects a name. All of this will give the initiative some sort of form – and form is important when it comes to communicating to the outside world. It is also crucial to the declaration at the end that the project was a success or failure it terms of delivery.
A kick-off meeting is difficult if there is just one of you. But more than one? You should be sitting down at least over coffee to shoot off the start pistol. This is great opportunity to confirm you are all on the same page.

A Plan and a Process
Here is where all full time project managers fail when we are asked for help on small projects. You do not need a detailed plan. But you do need a simple, high-level list of work to be done, who will be doing it and when it should be complete. You should establish a series of regular meetings with stakeholders and a regular reporting method. Communication within every project is the key to success – but it is one of the hardest things to do – because we all want to ‘over report’. Do a simple communication plan – who will get what information, when, how and WHY? Go through this exercise and you will start to wonder why you have been sending detailed 100 page reports to people who don’t care, shouldn’t care or never read it because it is too long.

And finally – after the project. You should take a moment to close out – record lessons learned, say thank you to all involved and make a graceful exit.

Simple? Sure. Be there are lots of risks to every project:

People are the toughest part of any project. They must be managed as much as you are managing the work they are doing. Technology will kill you at the 11th hour – we all know that one. And beware of change – the change in corporate direction in the middle of your project, the change in personnel, change in technology, to name a few.

All projects, regardless of size deserve to be managed properly. For those people out there who are not full time project managers, we need to help them with some simple, basic guidelines from our professional world of project management.

Tightening the Purse Strings and Getting Value for Money

Written by Cynthia Low on . Posted in Articles. 8 Comments on Tightening the Purse Strings and Getting Value for Money

Editor’s Comments

It may be the rough state the economy is in or it could be pure coincidence, but in this issue of Project Times we feature two articles focusing on the financial and value aspects of projects. Then again it’s an area that’s always worth taking a look at, especially since we all want our projects to be successful and on budget. Right?

In EVM: Project Management with the Lights On!, Brian Egan makes the point that project managers should be aware of the progress and status of their projects at all times. He also maintains that a benefit of Earned Value Management (EVM) is that it is basic cost accounting that extracts valuable information from work you’re routinely doing, so there are no major additional costs.

The importance of tracking actual costs and resource usage on a project depends upon the project, according to Tom Clark. In Why Track Actual Costs and Resource Usage on Projects, he says that in some cases tracking the actuals is not worth the effort involved. In other cases, however, he believes tracking actual costs and resource usage is an essential component of the project control function.

Our bloggers are back with their own distinctive views. Agree or disagree, your opinion matters to us, the bloggers and your fellow readers. Please share them through commenting at the bottom of each blog. Also place your vote with this issue’s poll question regarding PM education.

And finally, please enjoy this edition of Project Times.

Portfolio Management or Just Resource Management

Written by Mike Lecky on . Posted in Articles. 5 Comments on Portfolio Management or Just Resource Management

If you’re looking at improving your project portfolio efficiency and effectiveness be clear on what you need to focus on.

I experienced a situation recently where the motivation for project portfolio management was limited human resources. True, resource management is integral to portfolio management but broaching a limited resources problem with a portfolio management solution is overkill.

There are two things that project portfolio management aims at: alignment and contribution. ‘Alignment’ refers to aligning strategic objectives to investments, to projects and ultimately to resources. ‘Contribution’ means ensuring the benefits of the project as outlined in the business case are realized.

Resource management, on the other hand, involves putting the right type and amount of resources where they need to be, for the right amount of time. It assumes that decisions around what projects to do, over what periods, have already been made.

There’s a big difference between the two management activities. The most striking of these is the scope.

Portfolio management involves linkages between business strategy and execution. This requires a very different skill set than what you’d expect from a resource manager. It also requires continuous monitoring of project performance and risk indicators in order that the investment is protected.

Resource management is limited to resources not business decisions and not project health reporting.

If business decisions have been made to proceed with several projects, and there are insufficient resources to execute these projects in the time frames expected, then there is disconnect between the strategy and execution arms of the business. Either the total budget is not sufficient to support the aggregate cost (in terms of resources) of the projects, or the business cases have understated the amount of resources required. This is a problem portfolio management can resolve because it ensures projects are selected and prioritized based on total budget and resources available. Resource management will tell you to hire more people.

Today many organizations are faced with having to achieve more with less. There is always a strain on the resource pool in getting all work done. Targeting the problem of resource management by broaching assignment and allocation with a defined process, a skills inventory and a focused mandate can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the overall project portfolio. It may not solve the problem of pushing too much work into the pipeline, but it will highlight disconnects between a strategic decision to proceed with projects and the ability to execute on these decisions.

It’s a great first step to introducing or improving portfolio management.

 

Mike Lecky is a consultant at The Manta Group, a management consulting company specializing in IT governance, Project and Portfolio Management, Service Management, Risk and Compliance. Mike has degrees from the University of Waterloo (BScEng), The University of Western Ontario (MBA) and the University of Liverpool (MScIT). He worked for 12 years in aerospace electronics and as a Project Engineer managed several general aviation and US Military contracts. He teaches project management online with the School of Applied Technology at Humber College. Now, with over 25 years experience, he is a PMP and an information security professional (CISSP) and has a broad range of program and technology implementation experiences in the high tech and service sectors. Mike can be reached at [email protected]